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Expanding Rights to Quality Education: Critical Examinations of the Emergence of “Responsive Justice” in China
Organizer: Heidi A. Ross, Indiana University
Chair: Heidi A. Ross, Indiana University
Discussant: Stanley Rosen, University of Southern California
This interactive panel examines how educational rights and opportunities are contested and reinterpreted as uneven economic development and educational diversification increase disparity in educational provision in China. Papers represent multiple constructions of the right to education in practice and examine three key relationships through which educational rights have expanded: the relationship between greater autonomy of educational law and students’ rights; the relationship between “new poverty” and the struggle to universalize basic education; and the tension between public and individual interests that animate private higher education. Bridging presentations is the contention that educational rights must be integral to educational quality. This link is supported by overwhelming international evidence confirming that unequal distribution of educational resources limits overall achievement of quality education (Baker and LeTendre, 2005). It is also supported by state policy. In 1999 the State Council declared that achievement of educational quality (suzhi) would govern all education policy. This decision identified meeting the educational needs and rights of all students as a necessary pre-condition of suzhi. What suzhi entails and whom it benefits are vociferously debated, but most researchers (Ann Anagnost, Andrew Kipnis, Rachel Murphy, Tanja Sargent, Hairong Yan) agree that the self-disciplined, competitive consumer consciousness advocated by suzhi reforms advances a neo-liberal agenda that often derogates and disciplines minority and rural populations and privileges middle class urban populations. In examining whether securing and enhancing educational rights is compatible with efforts to raise quality, presenters provide mixed evidence of the emergence in China of “responsive justice.”
Chair's Overview--Definitions, Policies, Questions: Establishing the Links between Educational Rights and Quality
Heidi A. Ross, Indiana University
The genesis of this panel is a debate that erupted in 2006 when Ministry of Education spokesperson, Wang Xuming, defended educational inequality by comparing post-compulsory education to shopping for clothing--consumption that “should depend on one's economic capability and intelligence.” (China Development Briefing, 2006) Joining Wang’s critics, panelists wonder whether Wang’s contention represents a victory of the market economy, an erosion of the ideal of educational equality, or a call to arms for responsive justice. An overview of national/sociopolitical and international/economic policies promoting educational rights sets the stage for panelists’ examinations of the relationship between educational rights and quality. The overview includes analysis of the content, purposes, and significance of suzhi discourse, followed by an explanation of how suzhi functions at the policy level to integrate three contradictory educational goals, economic development, sociopolitical control, and social justice, (Tanja Sargent, 2006) that likewise influence educational rights. Zhang argues that public participation and institutional interaction create an environment for responsive justice that expands students’ rights to quality education. Seeberg shows how schools serving marginalized “low suzhi children receive parental pressure to resist suzhi, as only success in high stakes examinations assures a poor child social mobility. Lin concludes that private universities that expand access are still tuition-dependent, controlled by local officials, fearful of infraction and scandal, and limit students’ rights. By analyzing how rights are understood by stakeholders, panelists conceptualize policy as complex social practices and rights and quality not primarily as state mandate but as contested cultural resource.
Changing Legal Constructions of the Right to Education and Students’ Rights Consciousness in China
Ran Zhang, Indiana University
Article 46 of the Chinese Constitution establishes education as a fundamental right. Article 9 of the Education Law stipulates the inviolability of equal educational opportunity. This paper provides a conceptual framework for understanding these principles in action, outlining citizens’ duties to be educated, the state’s responsibility to provide education, the legal status of education as a constitutional right, and sources of law pertaining to the right to education. The framework draws from Nonet and Selznick (2001) who explain legal development and social change through three “stages:” repressive, autonomous and responsive law. Recent high-profile students’ rights cases illustrate how China’s state-centered approach to rights, with obligations of citizens to the state as paramount, has been altered by both top down policies consolidating rule of law and appropriation by individuals from the bottom up of rights made available through rule of law. While judges remain reluctant to hear school-student controversies, courts have become a venue for clarifying the boundaries of students’ rights and actualizing the principle of rule of law. Even unsuccessful cases raise rights consciousness, attract media attention, generate public debate, and trigger formal rule changes in educational institutions or educational administrative agencies. Reforms allowing student marriage and safeguarding student rights in disciplinary actions signal that student management must be based upon students’ statutory rights and duties. The author concludes that trends in the interaction among court cases, rights consciousness, and administrative rule formulation are engendering more responsive justice and thereby expanding student access to quality education.
Is Quality Education a Right for Village Girls?
Vilma Seeberg, Kent State University
China’s progress in meeting international Education for All obligations represents a phenomenal expansion of basic education attainment. This paper examines girls’ access to and engagement in education in isolated and hard-to-reach “new poverty” communities. Drawing upon ethnographic data from three ethnic groups in Western China, the author argues that considerations of quality must include equal opportunity in access and learning. This link emphasizes what is critical to education – learning by students. Post-reform schooling, built on a hierarchical system privileging an elite linguistic/cultural canon, has achieved quality through diversification of resources, including private contributions, and highly qualified teachers. When quality does not explicitly address equality it remains by definition elite. Quality is relatively easy to provide and sustain for a small portion of the population who gain advantage by reinforcing its exclusionary character. Expansion of education at all levels of schooling illustrates that such advantages cannot easily or at all be distributed widely. Overwhelming evidence shows that educating girls at the margins strikes at the crux of so-called intractable poverty, initiating trans-generational, sustainable development – particularly in declining regions. In such regions ethnic minority and Han girls fight for the right to quality education, modeling themselves after China’s most educationally successful “first ten.” Yet, their education is based on memorization and knowledge repetition, rather than knowledge construction and creativity, because suzhi reforms do not explicitly address equality in access and learning. The true test of suzhi reforms is whether the “last ten” can experience quality and higher levels of learning.
Private Higher Education in China: Expanding the Right to Education for Public or Private Good?
Jing Lin, University of Maryland
China’s transition from elite to mass higher education has forced reevaluation of educational goals, standards, and opportunities, leaving policy makers, administrators, and educators wondering how to define, measure, and enhance educational quality. Their answers will mean the success or failure of China’s place in the “worldwide revolution” of expanding private higher education. After a decade of rapid tertiary growth, 50% of Chinese senior high school graduates, over 18% of the age cohort, enter post-secondary schools. Responding to and accelerating this expansion, private higher education has registered phenomenal growth with 1,300 institutions taking in 10% of all tertiary students. Drawing on case study and survey data from a three-year project to examine private university goals, engagement of teachers and students, and administrative efficiency, this paper illustrates contestation among government officials, private universities, and the public over the role and authority of private higher education. The author concludes that state officials and the public perceive private higher education as furthering private goods and interests. Simultaneously, private universities open doors to millions of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Suzhi discourse at the post-secondary level, dominated by “world class” rhetoric, limits and distorts the possible paths toward quality that private universities might chart as they ask what students should be learning, what kinds of learning matter most, and who benefits from such learning. Responding to a contradictory mix of state controls and the desires of social groups for increased choice and diversity, private universities can play a positive role in engendering responsive justice.